The Other Side of Nowhere (18 page)

George and Nick were up ahead, following a narrow inland path. George was leading the way and Nick was next to her. He was shouldering the backpack that was now bulging with the ropes we’d taken from the hut. As I walked behind them I could hear the murmur of their conversation, but not what they were saying. Every now and then George would chuckle. Frankly, I couldn’t see what we had to laugh about and found myself getting annoyed again. I deliberately fell back a little so I couldn’t hear. But I couldn’t shut either of them out of my thoughts.

In all honesty, I’d had more than one reason for inviting George to Shell Harbour for the holidays. Sure, I invited her because I love hanging out with her, but that wasn’t the only reason.

I guess on some level I wanted to show her off to Nick. How smart and funny and pretty she is. I mean, I love George – not in
that
way, obviously, because we’re cousins. But she’s definitely the coolest girl I know. And if I’m totally honest, maybe sometimes I have wished we weren’t cousins. But anyway. So yeah, maybe I did want to show her off a bit. But that wasn’t exactly my motive for inviting her either.

It was about Nick and me. What I really wanted was for Nick to see me the way I was around George. Sure, George and I don’t always agree, but she lets me be myself. For better or for worse, the person I really am. When I’m with her, I believe in myself and say what I think. There’s just something about her. I know she’ll always listen and always forgive me if I stuff up. And that makes me feel strong and in control and able to make decisions.

I desperately wanted Nick to see me that way, too. When we were kids I didn’t care that he was always calling the shots, and I was just his sidekick. But then he moved away, and when George came back from overseas, I’d started hanging out with her. And I just started feeling differently about things. I knew deep down that Nick wasn’t the only one who’d changed. I’d changed, too. I didn’t want to be just his plus one anymore. And I figured if he saw me as his equal that maybe we could be real best mates again.

So that was my plan. But it had fallen apart. I probably should have guessed that George would fall for Nick, but I hadn’t really thought about it. Now George was so consumed by Nick – and he was obviously into her, too – it felt like whatever power she used to give me was being sucked right out of me.

I was so zoned out, brooding on all this, that I almost bumped straight into George. Her back towards me, she was as rigid as a statue with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. I hadn’t even noticed that the path had reached the edge of a cliff – not the one we were aiming for, though. Over the edge of this one was dense scrub and rocks. Up ahead, the path cut sharply away from the cliff’s edge, veering back inland again. I could see Nick’s head and shoulders disappearing over the edge of the cliff.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

George placed her hand on my arm. At first I thought it was just a gentle, reassuring touch, but then her grip tightened. Like she was restraining me. There was fear and concern in her eyes.

‘I saw something down there. Near those rocks,’ she said, pointing down at a clump of boulders. ‘Just wait here a bit.’

We moved a little closer to the edge to watch Nick. He was about twenty metres down the side and was still edging his way down further. Then he stopped, looking at something, mostly hidden from where we were standing, and George tightened her grip around my arm.

‘Nick? What is it?’ I called quietly. There was a frailty to my voice that gave away the rising anxiousness I felt inside.

He didn’t reply but beckoned us down.

George and I started carefully over the edge of the cliff, grabbing onto shrubs and rocks for support. I stopped next to George, and leant over to see what Nick was looking at.

I only leant halfway over before I realised it was a body. A human body.

As I stared at it, a wave of nausea washed over me and I became aware of my legs trembling under me. George gripped my arm harder as I fought against a desire to give in to my buckling legs.

The body lay spread-eagled across a damp, moss-covered boulder, badly twisted with its arms and legs at macabre angles, like someone had tried to put a whole bunch of human parts together but had lost the instructions for what a human should look like.

I could hardly breathe.
Is it Matt? No, it’s too big to be Matt. Please, please don’t let it be Matt.

Nick bent down as George and I stood over him, watching. With a cautious tug, he rolled the body over onto its back. Through half-closed misty eyes I saw a young man’s face, not much older than me. His dark, unseeing eyes were wide open and staring up at me. His hair and the shape of his face reminded me of Zaffar, but his features were softer. He was wearing faded, dirty jeans and at first I thought his shirt was splattered with blood until I realised it was just dried mud. He looked pretty much like one of us. Except he was dead.

As horrifying and sickening as it was to see a dead body up close, my relief that it wasn’t Matt was so overwhelming that I immediately felt guilty.

George looked away. Nick stood up and wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulders.

‘He must have fallen down the cliff,’ I said, looking back up. It would be easy to slip on the rocks, and tumble all the way down.

‘Or he was pushed,’ said Nick darkly.

‘Do you think he’s with those guys?’ asked George her head still in Nick’s shoulder.

Nick shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe Zaffar sent him out to track us.’

‘Or maybe he was trying to get away from them, too,’ I suggested.

George looked up suddenly. ‘Johnno, the guy you saw at Shell Harbour with the sleeping bag. Is this him?’

I looked at the lifeless face again, trying to keep the bile from rising any further in my throat, and shook my head. ‘No, it’s not him.’

‘How many people are on this island? This is really weirding me out,’ said George. That was the understatement of the year. Things were getting crazier and crazier by the second.

Nick nodded. ‘We need to find Matt. Let’s keep moving.’

George looked down at the body on the rock. ‘But we can’t just leave him here.’

‘We can and we have to. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.’

‘Nick, that’s heartless,’ said George taken aback.

‘No it’s not. It’s just practical.’

Of course it was heartless. The idea of just passing by a dead body like nothing was out the ordinary was just surreal. But Nick was right, we couldn’t do anything for the dead guy, and the very fact that we were standing next to a
dead body
made our mission to get Matt more urgent than ever. ‘George, Nick’s right. We have to go.’

Nick reached out for her hand. ‘As soon as we get out of this, we’ll tell the cops and they’ll come and get him,’ he said softly.

George looked away, but didn’t say a word.

Carefully we headed back up the cliff one by one. None of us looked back.

The path had reached a rocky plateau. I saw the edge of another cliff up ahead and the ocean came into view. Suddenly I recognised our surroundings. We were near the path where Nick and I had made our escape off the beach.

‘That’s the stream we should follow,’ said Nick quietly, pointing across the plateau to a line of water running on the far end of the cliff, ‘to see where it goes underground.’

‘
If
it goes underground,’ I corrected sharply. ‘And we said we’d check out the beach from up here first, to see if there’s another way.’

Nick said nothing, but continued walking to the cliff’s edge with us trailing behind. George pointed out the gully she’d climbed. It was only about ten metres away from where Nick and I had come up from the beach.

Near the cliff’s edge we stopped. We were overlooking the middle of the bay. Dropping to all fours, we crawled forward to peer over the edge of the cliff. My heartbeat quickened at the thought of Matt down there, somewhere not too far away.

We peered over the cliff and saw we were directly above the two tents and a little to the left of the stream that split the beach in two.

Nick tugged at my sleeve, nodding towards a boat pulled up on the sand at the water’s edge. It was an inflatable, the sort surf lifesavers use. Sitting in the rear of the boat, head down over the outboard motor, was Baldy. He seemed to be tinkering with the engine.

As my eyes scanned the whole beach, I spotted Zaffar. He was carrying some water bottles. He was right next to the cliff, a little to the left of us. Then he disappeared from view. I leant further out, trying to get a better view of the base of the cliff where he had been standing. But he was gone.

‘Mate, not too far,’ Nick murmured, pulling me back as bits of brittle rock at the cliff’s edge crumbled under my hands.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked, sitting back excitedly. ‘Zaffar? He was there, holding some water bottles, and then he disappeared.’

‘No, I missed it,’ George said. She leant out to see where I was pointing.

For a moment, all three of us stared at the spot where Zaffar had disappeared. But there was nothing.

Now it seemed certain to me that the men must be holding Matt in a cave. There was no sign of him on the beach, and there’s no way he would be held in the tent, with no-one guarding him. It was far too risky. And Zaffar disappearing so close to the edge of the cliff seemed to support the idea there was a cave. And why would he be carrying water bottles, if not to give them to somebody?

Finally, Nick said what I was thinking. ‘So we’re agreed, then? Zaffar must have gone into a cave. That’s the only way he could have vanished into thin air.’

‘Yeah, but so?’ George asked, her eyes still scanning the length of the beach. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

If there were a cave there that Matt was being held in, we’d have to get to it from the beach. That was our biggest problem. We could get down to the beach easily enough without being seen, via the gully George found or on the path Nick and I had used, but we couldn’t cross the beach without serious risk of getting caught. There was no way to sneak along the sand – we’d be fully exposed.

‘Unless we wait until dark, there’s no way across the beach,’ Nick said, obviously reaching the same conclusion as me.

I stared down. At the water’s edge Baldy had finished messing with the boat engine and was heading back up the beach. I had an awful realisation.

‘If they’re getting ready to leave we don’t have much time,’ I said, anxiously.

We stared at each other.

‘Well, I’ve told you what I think we should do,’ said Nick. ‘Our only chance is to find a back way into the cave where he’s being held.’

‘You’re both right,’ George said. ‘If we come at it from along the beach they’ll see us for sure. And we don’t have time to wait until it’s dark.’

I didn’t dare say what I was thinking:
If we try this we’re all going to die
. But as scared as I was, I knew it was time to man up. ‘Let’s do it.’

Nick grinned at me and got straight to business. ‘Right. Unless it’s an almighty maze inside the cliff, you’d think the water is falling down roughly in line with where it’s coming out down as the stream on the beach. That means the entrance must be around there somewhere.’ He gestured over to the stream he had pointed out on the way to the cliff’s edge.

‘Makes sense,’ George said. ‘Johnno?’

A rhythmic drumming in my head started, but I ignored it. ‘Yep. Let’s go.’